Saturday, 19 March 2016

Many residents of Old Buckenham arrived at the Village Hall this morning to hear about various current items of local interest. Perhaps they were attracted by the thought of sitting down to a cooked breakfast beforehand.

Breakfasts were served from soon after 8.30am and provided a chance to sit and talk to other villagers before the main event began.

Jonathan Kemp (parish councillor) talked about the progress so far on preparing a Neighbourhood
Plan for Old Buckenham and how this needed to tie in with plans being prepared for Attleborough
and for Breckland in general. He said that a questionnaire is being prepared that will come round to all villagers giving them an opportunity to give their opinions on what was good, bad or missing at the present time. Discussion was mainly on how Old Buckenham had to
be aware of possible encroachment from the Attleborough direction.

Steve Milner and Rona Boggia (parish councillors) updated the audience on
the progress toward moving Chapel Road School from Attleborough to the site in
Old Buckenham (where it will be known as Chapel Green School). After an
unfortunate delay to the start of building, re-tendering is taking place with work on site expected to
start in May this year with the new buildings being ready in late 2017.

The general feeling on the meeting was that the new school would increase
traffic in the village. The village welcomes the school moving to Old
Buckenham but pressure for necessary road safety improvements needs to be put on
NCC Highways and not on the Education Department.

Sarah Dye, chair of the Green Right Proprietors, led the discussions on the
future management of the village Green. She explained who the Green Right
Proprietors were and how they came into existence. Action that the Proprietors
could take was limited and she felt the best way forward would be for a
charitable trust to be set up including representatives from the parish council
and the villagers along with some of the Proprietors. This would allow money to
be raised to make some necessary improvements in the general care and management
of this most important area of the village.

It was 11.30am before the discussions ended and the chairman Terry Cracknell thanked everyone for participating and also thanked those who had cooked all the breakfast food.